Story by Rodger Nichols for Gorge Country Media
The Dalles City Council met last night with a full agenda — four public hearings, a pair of action items, and the annual tourism report from The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce.
Chamber executive Lisa Farquharson, gave an example of just one month-long campaign:
“We spent about $5,000 for the total campaign for a month long. Estimated total spend from those eye-exposed visitors was $7.2 million dollars.”
She said the Chamber’s efforts resulted in 18,000 more visitors, spending an estimated total of $75 million over a year’s time.
Action items last night included accepting title from Google to 4 and a half acres near the intersection of West Second and Snipes streets, and amending – that is, raising – portions of the city fee schedule.
Here are some of the things that are going up: The animal license fee will be renamed the livestock permit fee, and tripled from $25 to $75. The license is good for three years, and you only need one license per species. So if you have 10 chickens and a horse, you’ll only need two licenses Sewer fees will go up three percent, from $46.32 to $47.71 per month for homes in the city limits, from $78.74 to $81.0 for those outside city limits. The permit fee for a single day exclusive use of Lewis & Clark Festival Park jumps from $300 to $500, and adding a non-exclusive single day fee of $100.
The really big news was that in accepting the land, the city also accepted $28 million dollars of infrastructure improvements, all paid for by Google. City Planning Director Dale McCabe listed some of them:
“There’s two wells, a booster pump station, we’ve got a surge tank, and we also have 2 one and a quarter million gallon reservoirs out there on the site.”
But it was Councilor Rod Runyon that summed up just how big a windfall this is for the city:
“We’re often asked things like, ‘What does Google do for the community?’ and so forth. And they have a long list, actually, and this is a big one right here, basically donating two wells. They’ve provided more water from what I understand than they can actually use there, but they not only donated those wells, but they paid for all the infrastructure to make the city able to put it into the books, so to speak. And then we get to sell the water back to them that they use. So it’s kind of a cool thing.”